The tracking of assets is a critical aspect of inventory management. Large organizations may need to track and manage electronic devices used by employees, such as computers, printers, scanners, cellular phones, and so on. Tracking and management can be performed using an application that is installed on the device that reports to a centralized tracking and managing system. In other situations, tracking solutions can be implemented, which may consider a MAC address associated with an electronic device and subnet (i.e., “subnetwork”) address changes to attempt to track such equipment. A shortfall in this approach is that it does not pinpoint the physical location of the device. A subnet can cover a huge area and it is not unusual for such electronic devices to be physically moved without being detected by a “change in subnet address”, with the detection via subnet address change being too corpulent.
Previous solutions involved tracking the exact physical locations in a manual way, or ignoring the problem due to the complexity of keeping track of the locations of many hundreds of electronic devices. Many problems resulted from not knowing where all electronic devices in an organizations' fleet are located, particularly when attempting to service a particular electronic device that cannot be found.